Australia should celebrate success

The Rich List published during the week by this newspaper’s sister publication, BRW, shows that Australia remains a fast-growing frontier economy where anyone with drive and business acumen can do well.

The BRW Rich List is not one of old money or landed gentry as may be found in many parts of Europe. Nor is it a list of a corrupt Asian or South American country where wealth is derived from intimate contacts with the government.

Both the BRW list and the Wealth issue of The Australian Financial Review Magazine today show that the wealth of many of our richest people comes from hard work in areas such as mining, property development, and services.

Gina Rinehart
, the first woman to top the BRW list, has also been proclaimed the richest woman in the world, with a net worth just north of $29 billion. She inherited control of a $125 million iron ore fortune from her father, who had the foresight to see the ­Pilbara as a great source of wealth and, like all these top entrepreneurs, also looked to build up wealth for his children. But Mrs Rinehart has proved a shrewd enough businesswoman to protect that fortune, and even triple her wealth in the past year.

Then there is
Frank Lowy
, who came to Australia from Hungary in the early 1950s with very little (his father died in the Holocaust). Starting with a smallgoods delivery business, he built a property development and retail empire, the ­Westfield Group.

Andrew Forrest
started in stockbroking with very little, before moving into the resources industry.
Harry Triguboff
was born in China of Jewish immigrant parents and drove a taxi in Sydney before breaking into real estate development.

Apart from their ability to generate wealth, a point that stands out about these individuals is that some of them have given a great deal of time and money to the community.

Mr Forrest has worked hard to improve training and employment opportunities for indigenous people. Mr Lowy is deeply involved in soccer in Australia and has supported a broad range of causes. He funds the well-respected Lowy Institute for International Policy. Australia’s wealthy are usually not great philanthropists, but many individuals defy this stereotype.

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The men and women on BRW’s Rich List are not saints. They have plenty of tough business deals under their belts and many have sailed close to the regulatory wind, or directly against it. But they have generated a great deal of wealth that has benefited the nation overall. With all this in mind, it makes little sense for the federal government or Treasurer
Wayne Swan
to lash out at Australia’s entrepreneurial billionaires, accusing them of a ­sinister manipulation of the public debate. Mr Swan also claimed that their efforts would have been “laughed out of town" in the Australia he grew up in.

The exact opposite is the case. Until the 1970s, Australia’s wealthiest were often old-money families such as the Myers and the Baillieus. Deals were done by having a quiet word with ­senior government ministers in the likes of the Australia Club.

BRW’s first Rich List in 1985 showed a mixture of the old and new systems, as it included
Rupert Murdoch
and family and John and Robert
Ingham
(of Ingham chickens), along with the Fairfax and Myer families.

Australia needs the people on BRW’s Rich List, just as much as they need Australia.